1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to vehicle driving support control apparatuses for executing warning and automatic braking in order to prevent a vehicle from deviating from a driving lane in front thereof.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, for a vehicle, various kinds of driving support control apparatuses for a vehicle have been developed and put into practice to detect a driving lane in front of the vehicle, a three-dimensional object such as a vehicle and an obstacle in front of the vehicle using a camera, a radar, and the like, and prevent the vehicle from deviating from the driving lane and prevent a collision with the three-dimensional object. In such driving support control apparatus, highly accurate detection of driving environment in front of the vehicle directly results in accurately performing driving support control. Therefore, for example, a vehicle surrounding monitoring apparatus disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication (JP-A) No. 2003-217099 calculates the position of an object on the basis of information on a captured image, and calculates the position of the object on the basis of a reflected wave of an emitted radio wave. Then the apparatus calculates an observation position obtained as a result of observation based on both of the positions thus calculated and determines a possibility that the object in front of the subject vehicle comes close to the vehicle at a predetermined distance or less. When the possibility is determined to be high, the possibility is notified to the driver.
However, such vehicle driving support control apparatus for preventing collision has a big problem in the driving support technique, which is the difficulty of making determination as to execution, i.e., how to extract, present, and control necessary information when it is needed by the driver. More specifically, even if a three-dimensional object such as an obstacle in front of the vehicle is detected with a high degree of accuracy like the vehicle surrounding monitoring apparatus disclosed in JP-A No. 2003-217099 described above, there is a drawback as follows: when a danger that the driver is already well aware of is warned or controlled more than necessary, the driver becomes accustomed to such warning and control, and this may cause delay of reaction when the danger is really eminent, or the driver may be annoyed by the warning or the control, and turn off the driving support function. As a result the driving support control apparatus may be unable to accomplish its function.